The two met at a bridge; but there was a rattling, vertical space between them, paved with concrete and moss and the smell of petrol and blackberries and old paint. Even in that instant, and that instant was the closest they ever came to one another, they were little more than functionaries; they were little more than predicted passagers, following the ruts of their allotted courses; but, though they may yet live to be variously grey and old, their lives were created for no other purpose than to encounter one another that day, and to exhaust their meaning in a shared moment briefer than the beat of a mayfly’s wing.